What Catholicism Means to Me

I was brought up Protestant of no particular brand. Some years my mom and dad attended Baptist churches, other times they were Pentacostal, others they were Free Will. I had an Uncle on my dad's side who was a preacher. No one would ever think I would become Catholic.

Of all the religious influencers in my life my mom was an important influencer. Not because she was Catholic, but because she loved movies. But we're not there yet. What she also was was an armchair theologian. She treated the Bible like the neverending story. She approached the Scriptures like a jewelry box full of jumbled jewelry, tangled and knotted. She dug through it much like an archeologist, slowly unknotting the necklaces and strings of beads, odd earrings and bracelets, that old watch still keeping time that has been been ticking for 2000 years.

So what does her being a movie lover have to do with my future religious development? I think it began with a midnight viewing of Song of Bernadette. I guess I was 10 or 11 years old and it was during the school year. She told me late movie was showing a really great movie and if I wanted, I could go to bed a little early and sleep and she would wake me to see the movie then I would go back to bed.

After that, I watched The Nun's Story, Keys of the Kingdom, Shoes of the Fisherman, Our Lady of Fatima. Of course I saw all the holiday Jesus movies, in addition to The Ten Commandments. There were other sorts of movies as well. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Heidi and Little Women, and a few scary movies: Soylent Green, The Illustrated Man, The Demon Seed.

But it was those late night Catholic Centered films that began to spark my interest in the faith.